Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stormbringer | Hacker News Reader

From the article: "Resume, which conveniently brings your apps back exactly how you left them when you restart your Mac or quit and relaunch an app;"

I really really hope they offer a "blow it away and restart from scratch" option for apps. Having to delete and reinstall apps on the iPad that have properly crashed (as in fall over, and then when restarted just crash straight away again†) is annoying.

I actually preferred the 'inferior' way of doing things back when iPad was single tasking, because hitting the home button would undo most programmer screw-ups.

†Not sure how they manage this, probably via some settings in their core data that they read in and then get borked up again each time. My theory is that removing the app and then putting it back in works because the persistent storage for that app gets reclaimed when removed.

View on HN

You can force quit iOS apps. Double tap home to bring up the menu, then tap and hold the offending app icon. This will bring up the "jiggle" and a kill icon.

Doesn't always work. Spotify on iPhone became irreversibly borked for me once, requiring me to delete the entire app and reinstall it

It does, in your case it seems Spotify utterly corrupted one of its files (since shutting it down completely and restarting it didn't suffice). There isn't much the OS can do then.

That's exactly my point. There is no reset option in the case of a corrupted database or file inside the app bundle.

I am aware of force quitting as per your proposed solution, but it doesn't always work, hence the need to remove the app and reinstall it.

If the app can't even re-launch itself, a core support file is corrupted so resume or no resume is irrelevant.

Your 'correction' does not apply. Apps that have crashed are no longer running, and hence force quit will do nothing.

That's not force quit. That's uninstall.

To force quit, you stay in the app you are quitting, hold down the power button til you get the power-off bar, then hold down Home til the app quits.

No, the GP said "Double tap the home button", which brings up the Multitasking tray. If you go into jiggle mode there, you can terminate the app. You'll see a red icon instead of the X used for uninstall.

On the multi-tasking versions of iOS, double tapping the home button brings up a strip down the bottom of the screen. You can scroll left and right, and it will show you apps that you have recently run and/or that are still running. There's no real indicator to show the difference.

If you scroll all the way to the left, you get a bunch of music options, and the screen orientation lock, which is quite useful since they decided to remove that function from the hardware switch.

Now, while that bar is showing, you can press and hold one of those recently run apps, and it will jiggle and you can force quit it by pressing the x in the corner, very much like removing the app. As far as I know the force quit through this method is the same as the one with the power button and home key thing (maybe a bit faster).

Where your technique comes in handy is that the list of recently run apps does not include the currently frontmost or 'runningest' app or whatever it is. So you can't quit an app while you're in that app using the ribbon technique.

Snow Leopard (and probably earlier) already support this. When an app reopens twice after from the "reopen" button on the crash reporter it opens without loading the preference file.

Looks like that's gonna be the case. Finder in 10.7 apparently hides $HOME/Library/, so you will have to bust out the terminal to remove b0rken settings.

Interesting. You can always

$ open Library

to open it in a Finder window.

Or cmd-shift-G and type ~/Library

Good tip! I use this constantly in File Open dialogs (especially to get into hidden .folders). Also worthy of mention is that you can actually tab-complete paths in the dialog just like in the terminal.

You can make any folder visible or invisible to Finder. It's just a file attribute:

    # SetFile -a V ~/Library

Reply on news.ycombinator.com